How it works

Google's Summer of Code program is simple: you (the student) work on a project, full-time, during the whole summer, and you get assistance (advice, mentoring) from a seasoned Libav developer who knows his way around the project and has considerable standing in the community. By doing so, you'll learn to operate in an opensource project, you'll get relevant coding experience, and you'll have a chance at earning money while doing fun stuff during the summer. So, you need a project, a mentor, do a qualification task (see below) so we can quickly assess how good a candidate we feel you'll be for the program, and then you can apply.

Please detail the deadlines for applying and being a student/mentor.

Selecting a project

Below, you'll find two lists of projects:

Projects with a mentor

Projects without a mentor

If you choose a project with a mentor, talk to that mentor (see below) and select a suitable qualification task. Once completed, you're eligible for participating in our Summer of Code program. If you choose a project without a mentor, your first job is to find a mentor (see below). Then, once you've found a mentor, continue as before. If you don't like any of the projects, you're free to define your own project and find a mentor as mentioned before (see below for caveats).

Contacting developers/mentors

Once you've found a project (with or without mentor), start talking to the developers of the Libav project. We can often be found on IRC, and you can talk to us on mailinglists also. Hop on irc.freenode.net channel #libav-devel, or talk to us on libav-devel@libav.org. Ask about the FFmpeg/Libav fork as a first conversation subject. Here, you'll be able to ask around for mentors for projects without a mentor if you need to. If you're trying to define your own project, explain (with reasonable amount of detail) what you intend to achieve and why you think your project should be in our Summer of Code program. Once you've found a mentor, you're good to start your qualification task.

Note that the self-selected mentor needs to have considerable standing in the community to be eligible for mentoring. Likewise, if you choose to define your own Summer of Code project, some community members of considerable standing need to vouch for your project.

Your qualification task

The goal of a qualification task is to see if the mentor and student feel that, together, they will be able to finish the project of their choice. More specifically, the mentor will want to test whether the student has the skills and work ethics to complete a large coding project in a limited amount of time. The student will want to make sure that the mentor provides (useful) assistance when necessary. Therefore, students should select a mentor and a Summer of Code project before starting their work on a qualification task. The qualification task is often (but not necessarily) related to the selected project. For example, if your project will be to reverse engineer a new video codec, the qualification task may be to write a partial bitstream parser for that codec. If your project is to write a muxer for a container format, the qualification task may be to write the code to write the stream header.

There will be a second qualification task for every student: Pick a file of moderate size and reformat it in proper K&R style. The goal of this task is twofold: First it familiarizes students with the style that they will have to write their code in, second it demonstrates that students are able to submit patches from git and go through our review process.

Applying

While you're working on your qualification task, apply at http://www.google-melange.com/. The degree (and detail) with which you've finished your qualification task will determine how likely your project is to be selected. In the past few years, students that completely finished their qualification task always got selected as Summer of Code students, but that may vary depending on the number of spots we get assigned by Google, and the number of students that apply.

1st Tier Project Proposals

1st tier project proposals are project ideas that are reasonably well defined AND have a mentor volunteered.

HEVC/H265 decoder

HEVC is the next-generation video standard from the MPEG standards committee. Your job is to write a decoder that can playback HEVC files.

It does not need to be SIMD-optimized, but preferably has relevant functions separated in DSP contexts so they're easy to optimize later on.

This task will depend on the current standardisation status of HEVC. Final publication is in 2013 but there may be parts which will not change much anyway.

On2 VP7 decoder

VP7 is a DCT-based video codec. At the moment, it seems to lack a reference implementation, but we do have a spec and may take hint from libavcodec's VP8 and VP6 decoder and libvpx. MPlayer can decode VP7 by loading a binary. To begin working on the project, one has to setup a reference decoder against which to compare our output. This can be done by either writing a wrapper for the binary or (maybe) hacking libvpx itself.

You might want to discuss with us how and where to start. Drop by on IRC if you need help. It is not as difficult as it sounds.

RTMP[E|S|T|TE] protocol implementation

spin off build system into a separate project

Our build system is neat enough to make into a more general solution to be reused by other projects.

The goal of this project is to achieve exactly that. Intermediate steps will be reading, understanding and documenting the current build system, refactoring parts that can be generalized further and finally making a prototype implementation for libpostproc.

You will require skills in POSIX shell, GNU Make and a firm command of English.

Hardware Acceleration API

Libav has two different and incomplete api to provide hardware acceleration wrapping, the project should provide a better abstraction and migrate the currently implemented ones and additional provide more.